Felicia Schornstein Kahn, 1926-2018

Felicia Kahn had a long career in politics — started, she always said, in sociology classes at Newcomb College when she first joined the League of Women Voters of New Orleans. She became a lifelong member, and president from 1966-1968. In other work, notably for the newly integrated YMCA Dryades branch, she helped implement President Johnson’s Great Society legislation, especially in the areas of welfare and housing. She was one of the inaugurating members of the New Orleans Coalition (one of the city’s first integrated political organizations) and was a key member of the Independent Women’s Organization (IWO). A list of her accomplishments from this period shows a wide variety of activities.

In the 1970s, she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment. She was one of the few women to serve on the Democratic State Central Committee in the 1970s — and in the less visible aspects of campaigning, including organizing and getting out the vote. She was one of the first members of the Women’s Caucus at the Democratic National Convention in 1976. Kahn would go on to attend every subsequent nominating convention as a delegate but one.

In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, she was also active in the National Women’s Political Caucus of the Greater New Orleans Region, serving as a board member and president (1998 -1999). She worked to elect pro-choice women to political office. She was particularly committed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and the election of the first African American woman mayor of New Orleans, Latoya Cantrell in 2017. At the time of her death at 91 in 2018, she was serving again as an elected member of the Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee, representing District “B.”